later, in 1738, we find it described much as if it were some lately discovered island in the South Seas.
"The people in general," we read, "are naturally inclined to civility, especially to strangers. They are divided into Highlanders who call themselves the antient Scots, and into Lowlanders who are a mixture of antient Scots, Picts, Britons, French, English, Danes, Germans, Hungarians, and others. Buchanan describes the customs of the Highlanders graphically thus:—'In their diet, apparel, and household furniture they follow the parsimony of the antients; they provide their diet by fishing and hunting, and boil their flesh in the paunch or skin of a beast; while they hunt they eat it raw, after having squeezed out the blood.' … The Western Islands (the author goes on to add) lie in the Deucaledonian Sea. … The natives of Mull when the season is moist take a large dose of aqua-vitæ; for a corrective, and chew a piece of charmel root when they intend to be merry to prevent drunkenness. The natives of Skye have a peculiar way of curing the distempers they are incident to by simples of their own product, in which they are successful to a miracle."[1]
Into so strange and wild a country it required a stout heart to enter. A volunteer with the English army at the time of the Rebellion of 1745 wrote from Berwick:—"Now we are going into Scotland, but with heavy hearts. They tell us here what terrible living we shall have there, which I soon after found too true."[2] How few were the Englishmen who crossed the Tweed even so late as 1772 is shown by the hope expressed in the Scots Magazine for that year, that the publication of Pennant's Tour would excite others to follow in his steps.[3] Two years later Topham wrote from Edinburgh that "the common people were astonished to find himself and his companion become stationary in their town for a whole winter. … 'What were we come for?' was the first question. 'They presumed to study physic.' 'No.' 'To study law?' 'No.' 'Then it must be divinity.' 'No.' 'Very odd,' they said, 'that we should come to Edinburgh without one of these reasons.'"[4] How ignorant the English were of Scotland is shown by the publication of Humphry Clinker. The ordinary reader, as he laughs over the pages of this most humorous of stories, never suspects that the author in writing it had any political object in view. Yet there is not a little truth in Horace Walpole's bitter assertion that it is "a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots, and cry down juries."[5] It was not so much a party as a patriotic novel. Lord Bute's brief tenure
